Trail : Maven 2 fundamentals

The Project Object Model (POM):The POM is the heart and soul of any Maven enabled-project. It contains every bit of information Maven need to know about your project.

Naming Conventions: Maven needs to be able to identify every project artifacts precisely. Each deployed artifact has to respect Maven naming conventions.

The Standard Directory Layout: Maven is all about applying standard building patterns. One of the most common things project should share is a standard directory layout. Maven recommends (but doesn't enforce) a standard project directory layout.

The Build Lifecycle: Maven is based around the central concept of a build lifecycle. What this means is that the process for building and distributing a particular artifact is clearly defined.

Repositories: A repository in Maven is used to hold build artifacts and dependencies of varying types. Repositories allow Maven to manage your project dependencies and automatically share components between different projects.

Dependency Management: Dependency management is one of the features of Maven that is best known to users and is one of the areas where Maven excels. There is not much difficulty in managing dependencies for a single a project, but when you start getting into dealing with multi-module projects and applications that consist of tens or hundreds of modules this is where Maven can help you a great deal in maintaining a high degree of control and stability.